Recent advances in information technology have lead to the proliferation of data management operations such as data encryption, data deduplication and data compression.
Data compression is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use. Data deduplication generally refers to the elimination of redundant subfiles (e.g. blocks, chunks, or extents) from data objects. Data deduplication and data compression are data management technologies that are useful to reduce the consumption of expensive resources, such as storage space and transmission bandwidth.
Data encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge (e.g. a key). Data encryption is used to protect data where it is stored as well as while the data is in transit. For example, data encryption may protect data as it is being transferred via networks.
Administrators are tasked with developing security and data reduction strategies utilizing the data management operations of encryption, deduplication, and compression to optimize the computing environment. Each component of the computing environment may be under the responsibility of a different administrator (e.g. the system/application administrator, a network administrator, a storage administrator, a security administrator, server administrator, etc.). In most cases, the administrator for one domain does not have sufficient information about the data management operations and the data flow topology at the other domains. As a result, the data management operations applied in one domain may be redundant in light of data management operations applied at another domain, or even in certain circumstances, the data management operations in one data component may be in contention with other data management operations.